This is the fifteenth in a new series of posts sharing Pope Leo XIV’s words each Wednesday in his Weekly Audience, a time when he teaches, encourages, and shapes the mission of the Church around the world. Check back here each Wednesday to get to know Pope Leo!
If we are not the custodian of the garden, we become its destroyer.
In this week’s Wednesday audience, Pope Leo XIV invites us to reflect on a kind of integral ecology—a care for creation founded on the Resurrection.
Weeping near the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene does not immediately recognize the risen Jesus, but thinks him the gardener (cf. Jn 19:40–41). But she was not entirely mistaken—cultivating and keeping the garden is the original task (cf. Gen 2:15) that Jesus brought to fulfilment on the cross. Each one of us is invited to rediscover the same task: to hear the cry of the poor and of the earth, and to let it touch our hearts.
Christian hope, therefore, responds to the need for the protection of human dignity and of all creation. “We will see, then, what the eyes do not yet see: that garden, or Paradise, which we will only reach by welcoming and fulfilling our own task.”
